


A Morning in May

by Naladot



Category: Mary Poppins (Movies)
Genre: Childhood Friends, F/M, Magic, Romance, Sweet, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:48:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21841696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/Naladot
Summary: A storm's coming in. Bert gets ready for a date.
Relationships: Bert/Mary Poppins
Comments: 18
Kudos: 62
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Morning in May

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wendymarlowe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wendymarlowe/gifts).



> Written for Yuletide 2019. I hope you like this!

In the morning, Bert steps out his front door and soaks up the sunlight like a flower, his arms stretching into the sky in eager anticipation of the day ahead. Most days he wakes up with the same sort of chipper disposition, because most days bring along with them something new to discover, or uncover, or perhaps cover up—depends on the day, really, and what it calls for. Yesterday he found a kitten who had gotten separated from her mother—dreadful misfortune, what with the current political climate among the cats in London these days, though Bert hasn’t kept up nearly as well with the debates as he should—and tomorrow his supposes he will go ‘round to visit his friend who’s stuck up in bed, blue as a blueberry since his dog ran away. Today, though—well today, there’s a bit of a feeling in the air. Something that makes Bert feel like he’d better comb his hair and pat on some cologne, because he’s an optimist, keen for the sun to be hidden behind rain clouds if it means the wind won’t change.

The feeling follows him as he takes up his tamborine—a new endeavor for him, singing in the streets, and he usually comes away no worse for wear—and steps out into the street. The wind’s in the east, and a mist is rolling in slow and steady.

He calls on the Cherry sisters in their back-alley sweets shop and selects a couple of pastries, which he has the sisters pack up in one of their special boxes. “It’ll keep fresh until the afternoon, won’t it?” he asks.

“Naturally, Bert,” sniffs the sister attending to him. “Have you got someone to share these with?”

He glances out their glass window at the darkening sky. “Well, I’m not sure yet. I should like to think I do.” He grins, and holds up the box. “This is waterproof, isn’t it?”

“Naturally, Bert,” she says again, now looking fully irritated. He pays with his earnings from the previous day’s work as a lift operator. (He quite likes working as a lift operator, seeing as in that particular building the lift goes right on down to Australia and back, but he doesn’t like not seeing the sky all day.)

Out on the street again, he muses to himself how it might happen. He’s a young man still, prone to fantasy, and he dreams up a fanciful story for himself. The wind won’t stop, he’s quite confident now. A storm is coming.

  
  
  
  
  


Bert first saw Mary Poppins when he was twelve years old, surveying his new haircut in the warbled mirror hanging on the wall in his uncle’s country home. He does not consider this their first meeting, as they were never properly introduced.

For a split second, in the space where his own eyes should have been, he saw instead the face of a girl peering curiously back at him.

“Bert!” called his mother.

Bert pushed his fingertips along the backside of the mirror, but in the brief moment he got to look behind it, he found only a regular wall.

He pondered the girl in the mirror for the next several days. There was the distinct possibility that Bert _was_ the girl in the mirror. He considered this option among others, faerie tricks and tricky witchcraft, but he did not bother to ask his uncle or his mother, as he already knows well enough that adults were not much use to the more serious mysteries of life. It was if they saw a more limited range of colors, which was quite unfortunate so far as Bert is concerned, but he considered it a limitation of their age, and did not bother himself too much about it. His mother only dabbled in magic to refill the salt shaker when it went empty, after all. If someone had put a hex on him, he should find out on his own.

They’d come to stay with his uncle in the country because his mother had taken ill, some sort of unidentifiable disease that only fresh air could cure. Bert loved the countryside. In London, where he was born and grown, one never saw much more than the dainty clasp of sunlight within the morning dew drops collected on the trees in the park. Here it seemed that no matter where he looked, the dawn and dusk unfolded before his eyes, whispering secrets he couldn’t quite understand.

Several days after the incident with the mirror, Bert finally found the girl sitting on a log down by the river. He should have guessed that, really.

“‘Ello,” he said to her. “Put a hex on me, ‘ave you?”

The girl looked up at him without any sign of surprise. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I haven’t.”

“Then how’d you find me?”

“With a _map_ ,” she said, as though it was the simplest thing in the world. “Haven’t you got a map of mirrors to refer to?”

Bert decided he liked this haughty girl, primarily because she looked so funny, all straight lines and sharp angles out here in the countryside, where everything grows on a curve. “I ‘aven’t got me one of those.”

“They’re quite standard,” she said.

Bert grinned at her. “Are they?”

“How old are you?” demanded the girl, “That you haven’t got a map of mirrors?”

“Twelve. ‘Ow old are you?”

“Two hundred and eight.”

Bert let out a low whistle. “You’ve got to be pulling my leg. You don’t look older than eleven.”

“Well I _am_ eleven. But I have _lived_ for two hundred and eight years.”

“‘Ow’d you manage that?” asked Bert, intensely curious.

The girl looked at him as though he was quite ridiculous, but he could see a smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. “Well, most people mature as they age, don’t they? I decided I should like to do it the other way around, and age as I mature. I’ve been eleven for quite some time now.”

Bert was impressed. “Are you ‘uman, then?”

The girl scoffed at him and stood up. “ _Of course_ I am human. What an insult! I have never been so ill-treated in my _life!_ ”

“Really?” Bert laughed. “In all two hundred and eight years, no one asked you ‘ow you managed to be so different from everybody else?”

The girl scoffed again, turned on her heel, and disappeared.

Bert had never liked anyone so well, and he hoped the girl showed up again, because he would very much like to be her friend.

  
  
  
  
  


It’s funny to him, thinking back on his childhood days as he meanders through the London streets. Oh, he’d had himself a few too many adventures as a young boy, including the time he helped his grandfather sweep up stardust (nasty stuff) and that time he ran away from home to join a traveling band (funny people; they always seemed to take forever to get on the road but the journey would happen in the blink of an eye), but his adventures all paled in comparison to the one time he’d met _her_ , even when she was just as young as he. In a sense.

He purchases a pair of balloons in the park.

“Spending quite a lot today, I see,” says the balloon woman, nodding at the pastry box in his hand.

“It’s a good day for spending,” Bert replies. “Nice weather, ain’t it?”

A drop of rain lands on his balloon and spatters against his cheek. He grins.

“I should say so,” says the woman, and winks.

  
  
  
  


The first time he met Mary—the first _official_ time—he was eighteen and working as a train porter. He loved that job, talking to all the unusual people who came and went, carrying bags full of secret things. That was the first time he realized how silly people were when they assumed that just because they’d hidden their secret stash of alcohol or magazines in their luggage that no one else could know. The luggage talked, of course, and Bert became the keeper of secrets.

“You know gossip is terribly unprofessional, don’t you?”

He turned from the bag he was currently interrogating and saw a woman standing right there on the platform, glaring him down as though she knew all the things he was discussing with the luggage.

“‘Scuse me, miss,” he said quickly, tilting his cap to her, “just putting the luggage on board.”

“Don’t you dare lie to me,” said the woman, arching an eyebrow at him. She looked about twenty-two or twenty-three, and she was dressed in the gray, professional uniform of a service worker. Nanny, perhaps. “I can _hear_ you, you know.”

Bert leaned against the luggage cart, slightly astonished. “Can you really?” he asked, abandoning pretense. He’d never been much for lying, anyhow.

“Naturally,” she sniffed. “It’s quite simple to learn, after all. Luggage really isn’t all that complex.”

They stood there staring at each other, and then it occurred to him.

“You’re the girl,” he said, snapping his fingers. “The girl! Down by the river, by me uncle’s old ‘ouse!”

Her eyes went wide. And then to his shock, she smiled. “Well, I never in all my days—”

“And ‘ere I thought you were going to go right on being eleven indefinitely.”

“I did have a good bit of fun,” she said. Her smile softened her features in a way he could only admire. “But of course, we must all grow up in time.”

“Seems you overshot me by a few years.”

“There’s work to be done, after all—pardon me, did I never ask you your name?”

He smiled and took off his cap. “You was only a child then. No shame in that. I’m Bert.”

“Mary Poppins.”

He took her hand and kissed it properly, the way his mum had shown him he should. “Mary Poppins. What a name.”

They smiled at each other for a moment longer. “Bert,” Mary Poppins said then. “It’s my day off. I was going to go see my mother—she’s been writing me about this cow, you see, and I thought I should go take care of the problem—but I would much rather enjoy my day on an outing. Could you recommend anywhere?”

Bert grinned. “Could I ever, Mary Poppins.”

And so he left his work with a bounce in his step and escorted Mary Poppins out of the train station. As they stepped outside, she accepted the arm he offered to her, and they wandered happily down the sunny street.

“I know just the place,” Bert boasted. “Right out of your wildest dreams.”

He had in mind to impress her by taking her down to the park, where Old Man Jones put on a one-man show most days, using a few tricks Bert hadn’t puzzled out yet. Then they would perhaps take a boat out on the pond and paddle around for an hour or so, before finally going over to sit for silhouettes, which he’d give her as a gift.

But before they even arrived at the park, dark gray clouds had begun to form overhead. And then fat rain droplets fell onto the sidewalk.

“Well,” he said, “Ain’t that a shame.”

“There’s always the opera,” said Mary. He looked at her, and she nodded in the direction of a large poster hung from a bulletin board. It was illustrated beautifully with beautiful people in funny clothes.

“That there’s an old poster, unfortunately,” he said.

“Oh Bert, don’t be silly,” she laughed, and took him by the hand, and walked the two of them right into the poster.

  
  
  
  


And so, Mary’s day off became Bert’s day out with Mary. They went to all the nooks and crannies of the world, and even once right up to the roof of the world. (The scientists will say there isn’t a roof, but it’s all a matter of where you’re standing, is what Bert knows to be true.) Sometimes she’s older than him, and sometimes he’s older than her, but the constant is that every day with Mary is a jolly day for him indeed.

Today, he climbs to the rooftop of a tall building overlooking the Thames to wait. Up there, with the city stretching in every direction, he feels as though he is floating among the stars.

Of course, Mary won’t come by just yet. Like him, she has work to attend to. Always something to be done, someone to be concerned about, or someone to set right. (Her cousin, after all, is too often wrongside up.) But on her second Thursday, he’ll be ready. Those days are for him, after all.

He takes one of the pastries out of the box and sets it on his handkerchief. Then he folds the box up and ties it in a neat little bow, and attaches the balloon he’d bought to the ribbon. The balloon pulls the box up, and up, and up—

“See you soon, Mary Poppins,” Bert says, and a thunder claps in reply.


End file.
